Monday, May 18, 2009

What's Your Fetish

I love the opening essay in the book Video Green in which Chris Kraus describes her father's books and book fetish.

Bound in calf and vellum, with spines strengthened by a set of horizontal struts fashioned from meshed twine and embedded underneath the leather, the books, of course, are very old. The pages have that pungent, mildewy smell of things left too long in a damp basement. They are whisper-thin and graying at the edges. Everything falls apart... Over four centuries of use and curiosity, the pages have come loose and have been collected, reassembled and then sewn back together. The earliest of these books are set in a heavy Saxon gothic typeface. Crude and deliberate. A type that wasn't going anywhere. A type that summons up a world of fear and faith and ignorance, of plagues and herbal cures, seasons, weather, straw mattresses and ox carts. A cosmogony in which one might actually seek out a book of common prayer, where "common" means not ordinary but "collective."

If you didn't have a book fetish before you read that, you might now.

Which gets me to my point. I was talking to Chris Perez yesterday about the main character in my novel, who also has a gallery. If you like fetish, you're gonna love the summer group show at Ratio 3.

Just consider the proximity of Ratio 3 and The Armory. I'll let you connect the (beware: there are graphic images involved!) kinky dots .